A Short Story By Gail Fulkerson
Freddie managed an apartment building in a small town in Ontario. He was an idiot, and almost everyone knew it, except him; he remained clueless. His wife told him he was an idiot all the time, but he just figured she was talking about someone else with the same name.
His parents couldn’t believe it when he came home one night and told them he was getting married. They wanted to know whether his fiancée was mail ordered or had to be inflated. After the honeymoon, which consisted of a short drive to the next town over, and an overnight stay in the car at a roadside stop, Freddie and his wife returned home and purchased a big old house in Hagersville, and converted it into half a dozen small apartments. Freddie had to go down to the basement from time to time to check the furnace and water heaters, and, during one such basement visit, he discovered he could hear, word for word, conversations taking place in the ground floor apartments. One-sided phone calls were hard for Freddie to follow, but still produced juicy bits of gossip for him to repeat to his wife, if she was listening to him that day. Eavesdropping became his passion, until the day he overheard the little old lady in 1B plotting his demise.“So, how ‘bout we stab him to death and stuff him in that hole he’s been diggin’ to enlarge the basement? We’ll paste him right up against the wall and shovel all the dirt back over his body. No one’ll ever suspect a thing. They’ll just think the feeble-minded little weasel took a ride from a stranger and couldn’t find his way home.
I mean, really, Martha, how many times has his wife said, ‘The idiot did it again. I gave him a shopping list and told him to go up to the IGA and come right home again. It’s been two days, and I haven’t seen him yet. What an idiot!’
Can you hang on a sec? I think I hear something. It’s Freddie, making whimpering noises. That little bugger’s been eavesdroppin’ in the basement again. Crap on a cracker! We’ll have to do this right now, before he can go to the cops. Can you bring over your biggest, sharpest butcher knife? No, wait. Make it the filleting blade or maybe your boning knife. Yeah, he’s still down there. I can hear him moaning.”
Jill stomped a few times on the floor in her kitchen, dislodging clouds of dust and cobwebs from the joists below, which promptly fell into Freddie’s upturned, frightened face. Being the idiot that he is, he forgot to close his mouth and eyes. Jill could hear him coughing and sputtering; she yelled down at the floor: “Serves ya right, ya little eavesdroppin’ idiot!” Martha, I figure if you’re here in half an hour, we’ll have plenty of time before his two brain cells find each other in that big and dark empty space in his head and tell him to get the hell out of the basement before the old lady in 1B, and her friend get him. Then, one brain cell will ask the other brain cell, who’s Martha?, and the idiot will forget everything he heard me say.
Yeah, I think I still have the tarp from the last apt manager I dusted off. I never used Enduster that time, either! Still got all my protective clothing, too. Ya just can’t be too sure who’s got an infectious disease these days. And, if I went down there unprotected, did him in, then found out later that I got some disease from him, I’d dig up the son-of-a-bitch and kill him all over again! Okay, Martha, see you when you get here.”
Freddie was crouched in the darkest corner of the basement when Jill and Martha started down the stairs. He wasn’t hard to find - they just followed the sound of his whimpering. ‘Oooh, this is too easy’, Jill thought to herself. “ooh, this is too easy”, Martha said out loud. Freddie swooned and almost spoiled their fun when he saw the two old ladies approaching him, clad in their protective clothing and dragging a large blue tarp. His knees buckled, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he started slumping to the floor, but Martha saved the day. She yelled at him to ‘stand up straight, numb nuts!’ He snapped to when he heard that; his Mom used to call him that when she was mad at him, which was most of the time. One of the basement lights glinted off something long and shiny. Freddie blubbered. The tears from his eyes and the snot from his nose streamed together into a liquid mess that mingled with the slobber running down his chin and onto his shirt.“Freddie, if you had two clues, you’d be on the floor playin’ with ‘em”, remarked Jill, as she straightened out the tarp. “Soon as I get this thing straight, you lay down in the middle of it, with feet together, and your arms at your sides. And quit your cryin’! Anybody listening might think we’re tryin’ to kill you down here!” Jill and Martha both cracked up at that one. ‘God, I slay me!’ Jill chuckled. The two of them laughed even harder.
Freddie did as he was told; he was too afraid not to. After all, one of those crazy old hags had a knife.
The two women folded the tarp over his prone body and secured it with some clothesline rope they found hanging on a nail. Freddie was supposed to have strung it for one of the tenants three months ago, but he never got around to it. See what ya get fer procrastinating?
“Wanna stab him first, or shall I? Nah, you go ahead, Jill. After all, it was your idea.” “Ready, Freddie? Don’t give a shit if you are, ‘cause here it comes!” The two women could hear him whimper the word no and saw the tarp shift as he moved his head from left to right.
The two little old ladies could pinpoint the exact moment that Freddie’s miserable life flashed before his eyes; it was right before the first blow struck his chest. Jill’s little old lady fist struck Freddie on the breastbone. Freddie screamed and started writhing in the tarp, trying to free himself. Martha struck him with her old lady fist in his left eye and he screamed again. They struck him with their fists a few more times for good measure.
“How bad are ya bleedin’ in there, ya idiot?! Are ya dyin’ yet?! I’m gonna stab ya some more with my fist, just to make sure, ya stupid, eavesdroppin’ sack-o-shinola!”
“I don’t wanna die! I’m bleedin’ real bad in here. You musta got me in the crotch, ‘cause my pants are soakin’ wet. Please don’t stab me no more! Please!” He wailed and bawled and blubbered as the two little old ladies, bent over double, laughed until they cried.
Jill and Martha returned the next morning to free Freddie and to warn him that if he ever told anyone what happened, he be carted off to the loony bin. They promised they’d catch up with him there and do him in for real. And, besides, who would believe a raving lunatic claiming that two frail old ladies tied him up in a tarp, stabbed him, and left him for dead in a basement?
Freddie was still in the tarp, snoring, when Jill and Martha arrived. He had managed to get himself into a fetal position sometime during the intervening hours, and slept the night away like he was in his own bed. When the two women got there, a mouse was gathering some of his ear hair for nesting material.
They kicked him in the guts to wake him up.“Wakey, wakey, slobberin’ suck face. Wanna go home now? You do? Well, before we let you go, there’s a few things you need to remember. First of all, if you ever tell anyone what happened here, we’ll make sure you end up taking a one way trip to the Ontario Hospital, where they’ll pump you so full of drugs, you won’t be able to do nuthin’ but spend the rest a yer life propped up against a wall, droolin’ and pissin’ on yerself. If you tell on us, we’ll tell on you, about how you eavesdrop all the time, how you smoke marijuana in the basement while you’re eavesdroppin’, then eat potato chips and leave the empty bags all over the basement floor. I don’t know how many times I’ve come down here to do laundry and slipped on a greasy chip bag layin’ on one of the stairs, where you left it. Broke my ankle fallin’ down the last two steps carryin’ a loaded laundry basket, ya putz! We’ll tell everyone where you keep your nudie magazines, and how you look in the apartment windows, especially at night, and how Mr Reid caught you lookin’ in his window one time, and that’s why you walk with a limp when it gets cold out now.
Okay, idiot, do we understand each other? You keep yer mouth shut and we’ll keep ours shut. Good. Now, lie still and we’ll get ya outta that tarp.” Jill and Martha cut the clothesline rope and opened the tarp. They did it quickly, so they wouldn’t have to smell the stench Freddie left inside the tarp. “Who died in here?” That crack set them both laughing hysterically again.
As soon as Freddie was free and had started up the stairs, and thinking he was safely out of reach, he started running his mouth. “I’m callin’ the cops on youse two bitches as soon as I get home! Then you’ll see what happens when you mess with Freddie!” He turned and took the first two stairs.
He never made it to the top. He slipped on a greasy chip bag he’d left on one of the steps. He tumbled, head over heels, just like Jack in the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme, dislocating his shoulder and snapping the bones in his forearm as he hit the concrete basement floor. When the ambulance and EMT’s arrived, Jill and Martha were administering copious amounts of TLC, as Freddie lay motionless on the floor, a folded jacket under his head. There was a goose egg in the shape of a small shovel on his forehead. (Had to make him quit screaming somehow.) He was coming around just as the women were telling the EMT’s that he landed on his forehead during his descent. Seeing Freddie fall down the stairs like that was so shocking, they said, that they could not be sure whether he hit a stair or the floor forehead first.
It’s been five years since the basement incident. Jill and Martha now share an apartment in a senior’s complex a few miles out of town. Freddie is still at the Ontario Hospital. Detectives visited Jill and Martha within a week after Freddie had gone to Emergency at the local hospital. They didn’t ask too many questions, once they saw how old and frail the two women were. There was no way these two could have committed the acts Freddie was accusing them of. Freddie’s a fixture at the OH. The nurses use him as a coat rack in the staff room.On the ambulance trip out there, the glimmer of a remembered conversation, overheard in a shadowy basement, floated through Freddie’s idiot brain. “Somethin’, somethin’, somethin’, we’ll make sure you take a one way trip to the OH, somethin’, somethin’, somethin’, ... I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night, ... Oh dee doo dah day, ... “Hey, cab driver, can we go to the McDonald’s drive thru?”
“Yeah, sure, just quit yer droolin’, ya idiot!”
What do you think about this story? Put your answer in the comments!
Freddie managed an apartment building in a small town in Ontario. He was an idiot, and almost everyone knew it, except him; he remained clueless. His wife told him he was an idiot all the time, but he just figured she was talking about someone else with the same name.
His parents couldn’t believe it when he came home one night and told them he was getting married. They wanted to know whether his fiancée was mail ordered or had to be inflated. After the honeymoon, which consisted of a short drive to the next town over, and an overnight stay in the car at a roadside stop, Freddie and his wife returned home and purchased a big old house in Hagersville, and converted it into half a dozen small apartments. Freddie had to go down to the basement from time to time to check the furnace and water heaters, and, during one such basement visit, he discovered he could hear, word for word, conversations taking place in the ground floor apartments. One-sided phone calls were hard for Freddie to follow, but still produced juicy bits of gossip for him to repeat to his wife, if she was listening to him that day. Eavesdropping became his passion, until the day he overheard the little old lady in 1B plotting his demise.“So, how ‘bout we stab him to death and stuff him in that hole he’s been diggin’ to enlarge the basement? We’ll paste him right up against the wall and shovel all the dirt back over his body. No one’ll ever suspect a thing. They’ll just think the feeble-minded little weasel took a ride from a stranger and couldn’t find his way home.
I mean, really, Martha, how many times has his wife said, ‘The idiot did it again. I gave him a shopping list and told him to go up to the IGA and come right home again. It’s been two days, and I haven’t seen him yet. What an idiot!’
Can you hang on a sec? I think I hear something. It’s Freddie, making whimpering noises. That little bugger’s been eavesdroppin’ in the basement again. Crap on a cracker! We’ll have to do this right now, before he can go to the cops. Can you bring over your biggest, sharpest butcher knife? No, wait. Make it the filleting blade or maybe your boning knife. Yeah, he’s still down there. I can hear him moaning.”
Jill stomped a few times on the floor in her kitchen, dislodging clouds of dust and cobwebs from the joists below, which promptly fell into Freddie’s upturned, frightened face. Being the idiot that he is, he forgot to close his mouth and eyes. Jill could hear him coughing and sputtering; she yelled down at the floor: “Serves ya right, ya little eavesdroppin’ idiot!” Martha, I figure if you’re here in half an hour, we’ll have plenty of time before his two brain cells find each other in that big and dark empty space in his head and tell him to get the hell out of the basement before the old lady in 1B, and her friend get him. Then, one brain cell will ask the other brain cell, who’s Martha?, and the idiot will forget everything he heard me say.
Yeah, I think I still have the tarp from the last apt manager I dusted off. I never used Enduster that time, either! Still got all my protective clothing, too. Ya just can’t be too sure who’s got an infectious disease these days. And, if I went down there unprotected, did him in, then found out later that I got some disease from him, I’d dig up the son-of-a-bitch and kill him all over again! Okay, Martha, see you when you get here.”
Freddie was crouched in the darkest corner of the basement when Jill and Martha started down the stairs. He wasn’t hard to find - they just followed the sound of his whimpering. ‘Oooh, this is too easy’, Jill thought to herself. “ooh, this is too easy”, Martha said out loud. Freddie swooned and almost spoiled their fun when he saw the two old ladies approaching him, clad in their protective clothing and dragging a large blue tarp. His knees buckled, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he started slumping to the floor, but Martha saved the day. She yelled at him to ‘stand up straight, numb nuts!’ He snapped to when he heard that; his Mom used to call him that when she was mad at him, which was most of the time. One of the basement lights glinted off something long and shiny. Freddie blubbered. The tears from his eyes and the snot from his nose streamed together into a liquid mess that mingled with the slobber running down his chin and onto his shirt.“Freddie, if you had two clues, you’d be on the floor playin’ with ‘em”, remarked Jill, as she straightened out the tarp. “Soon as I get this thing straight, you lay down in the middle of it, with feet together, and your arms at your sides. And quit your cryin’! Anybody listening might think we’re tryin’ to kill you down here!” Jill and Martha both cracked up at that one. ‘God, I slay me!’ Jill chuckled. The two of them laughed even harder.
Freddie did as he was told; he was too afraid not to. After all, one of those crazy old hags had a knife.
The two women folded the tarp over his prone body and secured it with some clothesline rope they found hanging on a nail. Freddie was supposed to have strung it for one of the tenants three months ago, but he never got around to it. See what ya get fer procrastinating?
“Wanna stab him first, or shall I? Nah, you go ahead, Jill. After all, it was your idea.” “Ready, Freddie? Don’t give a shit if you are, ‘cause here it comes!” The two women could hear him whimper the word no and saw the tarp shift as he moved his head from left to right.
The two little old ladies could pinpoint the exact moment that Freddie’s miserable life flashed before his eyes; it was right before the first blow struck his chest. Jill’s little old lady fist struck Freddie on the breastbone. Freddie screamed and started writhing in the tarp, trying to free himself. Martha struck him with her old lady fist in his left eye and he screamed again. They struck him with their fists a few more times for good measure.
“How bad are ya bleedin’ in there, ya idiot?! Are ya dyin’ yet?! I’m gonna stab ya some more with my fist, just to make sure, ya stupid, eavesdroppin’ sack-o-shinola!”
“I don’t wanna die! I’m bleedin’ real bad in here. You musta got me in the crotch, ‘cause my pants are soakin’ wet. Please don’t stab me no more! Please!” He wailed and bawled and blubbered as the two little old ladies, bent over double, laughed until they cried.
Jill and Martha returned the next morning to free Freddie and to warn him that if he ever told anyone what happened, he be carted off to the loony bin. They promised they’d catch up with him there and do him in for real. And, besides, who would believe a raving lunatic claiming that two frail old ladies tied him up in a tarp, stabbed him, and left him for dead in a basement?
Freddie was still in the tarp, snoring, when Jill and Martha arrived. He had managed to get himself into a fetal position sometime during the intervening hours, and slept the night away like he was in his own bed. When the two women got there, a mouse was gathering some of his ear hair for nesting material.
They kicked him in the guts to wake him up.“Wakey, wakey, slobberin’ suck face. Wanna go home now? You do? Well, before we let you go, there’s a few things you need to remember. First of all, if you ever tell anyone what happened here, we’ll make sure you end up taking a one way trip to the Ontario Hospital, where they’ll pump you so full of drugs, you won’t be able to do nuthin’ but spend the rest a yer life propped up against a wall, droolin’ and pissin’ on yerself. If you tell on us, we’ll tell on you, about how you eavesdrop all the time, how you smoke marijuana in the basement while you’re eavesdroppin’, then eat potato chips and leave the empty bags all over the basement floor. I don’t know how many times I’ve come down here to do laundry and slipped on a greasy chip bag layin’ on one of the stairs, where you left it. Broke my ankle fallin’ down the last two steps carryin’ a loaded laundry basket, ya putz! We’ll tell everyone where you keep your nudie magazines, and how you look in the apartment windows, especially at night, and how Mr Reid caught you lookin’ in his window one time, and that’s why you walk with a limp when it gets cold out now.
Okay, idiot, do we understand each other? You keep yer mouth shut and we’ll keep ours shut. Good. Now, lie still and we’ll get ya outta that tarp.” Jill and Martha cut the clothesline rope and opened the tarp. They did it quickly, so they wouldn’t have to smell the stench Freddie left inside the tarp. “Who died in here?” That crack set them both laughing hysterically again.
As soon as Freddie was free and had started up the stairs, and thinking he was safely out of reach, he started running his mouth. “I’m callin’ the cops on youse two bitches as soon as I get home! Then you’ll see what happens when you mess with Freddie!” He turned and took the first two stairs.
He never made it to the top. He slipped on a greasy chip bag he’d left on one of the steps. He tumbled, head over heels, just like Jack in the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme, dislocating his shoulder and snapping the bones in his forearm as he hit the concrete basement floor. When the ambulance and EMT’s arrived, Jill and Martha were administering copious amounts of TLC, as Freddie lay motionless on the floor, a folded jacket under his head. There was a goose egg in the shape of a small shovel on his forehead. (Had to make him quit screaming somehow.) He was coming around just as the women were telling the EMT’s that he landed on his forehead during his descent. Seeing Freddie fall down the stairs like that was so shocking, they said, that they could not be sure whether he hit a stair or the floor forehead first.
It’s been five years since the basement incident. Jill and Martha now share an apartment in a senior’s complex a few miles out of town. Freddie is still at the Ontario Hospital. Detectives visited Jill and Martha within a week after Freddie had gone to Emergency at the local hospital. They didn’t ask too many questions, once they saw how old and frail the two women were. There was no way these two could have committed the acts Freddie was accusing them of. Freddie’s a fixture at the OH. The nurses use him as a coat rack in the staff room.On the ambulance trip out there, the glimmer of a remembered conversation, overheard in a shadowy basement, floated through Freddie’s idiot brain. “Somethin’, somethin’, somethin’, we’ll make sure you take a one way trip to the OH, somethin’, somethin’, somethin’, ... I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night, ... Oh dee doo dah day, ... “Hey, cab driver, can we go to the McDonald’s drive thru?”
“Yeah, sure, just quit yer droolin’, ya idiot!”
What do you think about this story? Put your answer in the comments!
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